Golec and Van Bergh (2007) present evidence that the Need
for Closure moderates political conservatism but that the relationship is
mediated by adherence to a traditional or modern personal worldview. The
authors argue that both types of worldview can satisfy needs for closure by
presenting values “as absolute rather than relative . . . [and assuming] a
definite rather than approximate nature of truth” (Golec & Van Bergh, 2007,
p. 587). The traditional worldview, in this schema, “is based on a belief in a
single, unshakeable truth of a transcendental, nonhuman character, not
susceptible to rational verification or evaluation” (Golec & Van Bergh,
2007, p. 590).
While one might quibble with their emphasis on a single
“nonhuman character,” given the preponderance of polytheist. Agnostic, or
atheist belief systems that assert absolute values and absolute truth “not
susceptible to rational verification,” their distinction remains useful. They
are able to delineate a “traditional” from a modern” worldview,” where truth is
absolute but “verifiable and legitimized by rational, scientific means” (Golec
& Van Bergh, 2007, p. 590), and from a “postmodern” worldview where
“‘Truths’ are perceived as fragmentary and partial (p. 591).
In their study, Polish participants who adhered to a
traditional worldview when experiencing a need for closure tended to be more
conservative—as measured by questions used in a Polish public opinion pole,
questions which the authors claim are highly reliable. Those who
adhered to a modern worldview tended to be less conservative. Golec and Van
Bergh (2007) argue that the need for closure could lead to a preference for
traditional and modern worldviews over postmodern ones. The Worldview Model argues
that both traditional and modern worldviews could moderate need for closure.
Before the discussion continues, it should be noted that one
need not claim that traditionalists are necessarily conservative in the modern
political sense. Golec and Van Bergh’s Polish traditionalist participants were
conservative, but some traditionalists may be radical in their social goals,
seeking to establish a society based on values that include tolerance of
religious differences and intolerance of inequality. Even when this
is the case, however, the Worldview Model suggests that a traditional worldview
should increase the need for closure.
Traditional worldviews could motivate a need for cognitive
closure by suggesting that uncertainty is unreasonable, surprising, and must be
quickly resolved, at least with regard to transcendental truths and social
values. The traditional worldview provides many heuristics by which such
closure could be achieved, including a simple surrendering of judgment to an
authority with esoteric knowledge of transcendental truths. However, the
Worldview Model predicts that traditional worldview would, under certain
circumstances, provide more complex arguments that could lead to a resolution
of uncertainty.
Some circumstances demand that closure be achieved through
elaboration—the careful consideration of information in order to achieve stable
understanding (Petty, Cacioppo, Strathman, & Priester, 2004).
Elaboration occurs when people are able to grapple with new information and are
motivated to do so. One source of motivation is ambivalence, explicit or
implicit (Johnson, Petty, & Brinol 2011). Explicit ambivalence refers to a
conflict between consciously held beliefs and implicit ambivalence refers to a
conflict between automatic evaluations and consciously held beliefs. Implicit
ambivalence can occur, for example, when an individual has many, automatic,
prejudiced attitudes but explicitly endorses non-prejudiced ones. Despite the
traditional worldview’s emphases on resolution and a transcendental order, implicit
ambivalence may occur, for example, when implicit death anxiety (Jost et al.,
2003a) conflicts with an explicit belief that death is merely an end to earthly
life and a transition to eternal paradise. Implicit ambivalence could also
occur when explicit sympathy for the victim of a crime conflicts with implicit
needs to believe in a stable, moral universe (Furnham, 2003).
The last two examples of conflict could take the form of
implicit ambivalence but they could also take the form of explicit ambivalence.
In either case, they should motivate elaboration. Traditional worldviews may
offer a transcendental truth, but the very fact of that truth can be in
conflict with individual or even community experience. Disease, natural
disasters, invasions by other cultural groups, and disagreements within the
community, all may prove inherently threatening to the idea of a natural,
ontologically-based, order.
In these cases, although closure needs are high (and need to
avoid closure are very low), the task demands are such that integrative
complexity should result. Integrative complexity can result from conflict
between two equally strong values (Tetlock, 1986). While liberals,
in general, demonstrate greater integrative complexity than conservatives, they
may show less integrative complexity on certain issues, such as gay marriage,
where little value conflict is perceived (Critcher, Huber, Ho, & Koleva,
2009; Jost et al. 2003b; Joseph, Graham, & Haidt, 2009).
Integrative complexity could result from those situations in
which traditionalists who are high in need for closure cannot find closure by
relying on the first relevant set of values that comes to mind—for example when
an automatic attitude conflicts with the traditional worldview. Depending on
the strength of the need for closure, however, traditionalists may employ
various strategies for avoiding having to produce complex responses—including
categorizing issues in terms of single value dimensions whenever possible and
automatically shifting their stated values in response to situational
influences in a way that quickly resolves feelings of conflict and uncertainty
(Critcher et al. 2009).
The extent to which these strategies would be effective
would vary with the situation. Of the previously considered scenarios that
could encourage elaboration and integrative complexity, conflict within the
community may be both the most common and the most likely to produce a response
higher in integrative complexity. People who are high in need for closure tend
to seek conformity and adhere to cultural norms, but only when they are
uncertain, as Fu, Morris, Lee, and Hong demonstrated with American and Chinese
participants (2007). Otherwise, they tend to fall back on preexisting
beliefs, especially beliefs made more accessible through priming (Fu et al.,
2007, Kruglanski, Webster, & Klem, 1993).
Where community conflicts are generated by fundamental
disagreement, resolving resultant conflicts would require either the repression
of dissent or novel thinking. Agreeing to disagree would not be an option for
traditionalists who are members of the same community, although communities
might divide into different sects. Once conflicts are resolved, however, the
new perspective should become standard and used to resolve or avoid future
conflicts. This perspective may even the basis of the next
generation of closure-granting automatic-associations and heuristics.
Last, it is possible that traditionalists could conflict in
practice but not in philosophy.
While some worldviews may suggest that there is only one
right way of doing anything, others may allow for variation as long as it does
not challenge a fundamental order. Traditionalists, then, should vary depending
on their culture in the extent to which their absolute truth moderates a
nonspecific need for closure—leading to a general resistance to change and
uncertainty—and the extent to which it only moderates a specific needs for
closure on what the absolute truth is and what absolute values should be held.
The latter traditionalists may have the same level of integrative complexity as
modernists when it comes to justifying their particular actions. The
Worldview Model would predict revolutionary traditionalists, traditionalists
who seek to change the social order, to come from cultures that tolerate
political uncertainty while being intolerant, for example, of religious
uncertainty.
Interestingly, when high in need for closure, Critcher et
al’s (2009) conservative participants were more likely to change their
self-reported attitudes towards abortion in response to an issue-relevant
explicit prime—writing an essay either on the value of life or the value of
choice. Self-reported liberal participants were less responsive to priming when
high in need for closure. This suggests that worldview differences between
liberals and conservatives influence how individuals respond to need for
closure. One source of these differences could be variation between the traditional
and modern worldviews, if we assume that liberalism and modernism and
traditionalism and conservatism are both correlated in this sample.
Relative to the modern worldview the traditional worldview
tolerates more mystery. Truths are transcendental and an individual does not
expect to have specific answers to all of life’s perplexities. In the
modernist’s world, each individual expects to be able to achieve closure only
after an examination of the evidence—a process that could be cognitively intensive.
While closure is desired, it is not, necessarily, expected. Where it is
demanded, the modernist must study her environment, elaborating information
until stable understanding can be reached. Alternatively, the modernist might
rely on experts—individuals who share the same goals but are better able to
achieve them. In that case, however, she must still take responsibility for
choosing her experts wisely. The liberal participants in Critcher et al.’s
(2009) study were just as high in need for closure but were less susceptible to
automatic, primed evaluations, perhaps because they habitually regulate against
resolving uncertainty based on a gut instinct.
An alternate explanation could be that these liberal
participants held on to previously established beliefs in the face of new
evidence because those beliefs were the result of a more elaborative process
and, perhaps, were higher in integrative complexity. Not only is the modern
world inherently more uncertain, with that uncertainty being an obstacle rather
than a necessity, it is also amoral. Moral judgments are supposed to be the
products of deliberate reasoning and not, at least in Critcher et al.’s (2009)
American sample, based on gut-instinct..
At the same time, the modernist’s behavior may not always conform
to his ideal. For example, he may act on instincts, which he expects to be
perfectible and thus potentially imperfect, when he is under cognitive load.
Employing moral foundations theory, Joseph et al. discussed a study by Skitka,
Mullen, Griffin, Hutchinson, and Chamberlin (2002), in which liberals were
asked to decide whether to allocate funds to subsidize the medical treatment of
AIDS patients who were believed to be responsible for their illness. Skitka et
al (2002) found that liberals tended to deny funding when under cognitive load.
Cognitive load should, as discussed previously, contribute
to closure needs (Kruglanski, 2004, p. 74). In this case, Skitka et al. (2009)
argue that their participants were more likely to demonstrate the fundamental attribution
error when under cognitive load. Western participants have been shown to make
more individual-based attributions (and Eastern participants more
situation-based attributions) when experiencing an elevated need for closure
(Kruglanski, 2004, p. 73). Haidt et al. (2009) argue that liberals who were not
under cognitive load sought a resolution between implicit concerns for purity
and explicit concerns for harm, elaborating in the face of implicit
ambivalence. Under cognitive load, automatic concerns for purity dominated may
have decision-making.
In this case, a modernist participant may act similarly to a
traditionalist participant, but with different justifications. The
traditionalist may be more motivated to incorporate automatic reactions into
her worldview and not to see conflict between automatic and deliberate
judgments than the modernist, but the modernist may also decide to rationalize
his judgments in order to think of himself as a rational person. The
traditionalist may, alternatively, reject her judgment, considering it to be
morally flawed. The modernist may reject his judgment, considering it to be
irrational.
The Worldview Model cannot predict the exact conditions
under which a modernist participant would reject her automatic evaluation and a
traditionalist participant accept his automatic evaluation are unknown. The
modernist’s realization that she is automatically stereotyping, for example,
can trigger self-regulatory effort if she does not explicitly endorse these
stereotypes (Richeson & Trawalter, 2005). Over time, automatic activation
of stereotyping can be inhibited by the automatic activation of competing
goals (Moskowitz & Li, 2011) and her automatic attitudes can grow
closer to her explicitly endorsed ones. She can, in other words, reject her
automatic reaction and seek to become more “perfect.” Under high need for
closure, she may be more likely to stereotype (Kruglanski, 2004, p. 83).
However, this failure to adhere to explicit norms may later motivate
self-regulation.
Beyond stereotyping, modernists may also have to experience
automatically-activated traditional beliefs, beliefs which are common in most
societies for historical and, potentially, social cognitive reasons. Work by
Kay and colleagues suggest that traditionalists and modernists will both deny
randomness and assert control. His research, as well as that of Landau and
colleagues (2010), suggests that in more modernist societies individuals may
prefer to believe that the world is structured and non-random even if they do not
have specific evidence for these beliefs.
Two strong sources of perceptions of order or randomness in
the world are beliefs in supernatural forces and beliefs in the government. In
one experiment, Kay, Shepherd, Blatz, Chua, and Galinsky (2010) looked at
changes in perceptions of the stability of government in both Malaysian and
Canadian participants and saw a subsequent increase in belief in a controlling
God. Affirming government decreased belief in a controlling God among Canadian
participants but did not affect whether participants reported that the concept
of God helped them to find meaning in their own lives. Using a representative
sample recruited online, Kay and colleagues then presented articles suggesting
that cutting edge physics indicated that either science could explain all
events or that there were some events that might be influenced by a
supernatural force. Participants in the first condition showed relatively more
support for the political system than participants in the second condition.
It would be more remarkable if belief in God was manipulated
among those participants who were absolutely did not or absolutely did
believe. However, many of the participants in Kay et al.’s study (2010)
could probably draw on both more traditionalist and more modernist beliefs.
Some participants may have endorsed modernist beliefs more strongly, but
beliefs in God may have been both accessible and considered potentially viable.
The modern worldview, after all, does not necessarily deny God, it only claims
that the existence of God can be rationally evaluated. Many people may take
tentative stances that are responsive to situational motivations, at least in
the short-term.
A modernist who absolutely did not believe in God may have
responded to the need to perceive nonrandomness and stability in his world by
supporting the government. It should be noted that, in another study by Kay
(Kay, Moskovitch, & Laurin, 2010), participants who were able to
misattribute the arousal caused by being primed with reminders of randomness to
an herbal supplement showed no significant change in their belief in
supernatural sources of control. This is further evidence that the motive to
perceive randomness must be interpreted by the individual before it affects
worldview. Both a traditional and modern worldview may equally well satisfy the
motivation to perceive non-randomness, depending on situational information of
the sort that Kay and colleagues provided their participants.
The relationship between the need for closure and Kay and
colleagues other, potentially related, need to perceive non-randomness is not
absolutely clear. However, it is possible that the motivation to perceive
non-randomness constitutes a distinct source of the need for
closure. The need for closure scale, which is divided into five
facets, each of which is defined as a potential source of need for closure,
includes three facets that could relate to the motivation to perceive
non-randomness—preference for order, preference for predictability, and discomfort
with ambiguity (Kruglanski, Atash, DeGrada, Mannetti, Pierro, & Webster,
1997).
Under high need for closure that originates from cognitive
load, participants who are motivated to perceive non-randomness may increase
their belief in a controlling God or their belief in a strong government,
whichever was more accessible. This interaction of needs could explain why some
conservatives come to accept the status quo, even when that status quo includes
beliefs with modernist origins (Jost et al., 2009). Conservatives who are
relatively higher in nonspecific needs for closure may accept any belief that
satisfies their need to perceive non-randomness.